Generally, the evolution of computer and communications products has been governed by such principles as “Moore's Law”, where both the density of the components increases, and the cost of such a component decreases with time. This has also often been accompanied by increases in transfer and computation speed. These trends have often increased the power dissipation density and required new solutions to either dissipate the heat or operate in the high temperature environment. In high speed circuits, both signal propagation delay and the design and manufacturing tolerances may place limitations on the realizable speeds attained in practice.
Contemporary memory system architectures may demonstrate tradeoffs between cost, performance and the ability to upgrade, for example; the total memory capacity of the system. Memory capacity is commonly upgraded via memory modules or cards having a connector/socket interface. Often these memory modules are connected to a bus or interconnecting wiring disposed on a backplane to utilize system resources efficiently. In addition to upgradeability, many of these contemporary memory systems also require high throughput for bandwidth intensive applications, such as graphics.
One popular type of memory module is a Dual In-line Memory Module (DIMM). The DIMM is a rectangular low-profile circuit board that has electrical contact points arranged on both sides along one long edge. The contact points form electrical connections to the main board memory bus when the DIMM is inserted into a DIMM memory socket.
Memories used in computing and communications systems include, but are not limited to, random access memory (RAM) of all types (e.g., S-RAM, D-RAM); programmable read only memory (PROM); electronically alterable read only memory (EPROM); flash memory, magnetic memories of all types including Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM or FeRAM) as well as NRAM (Nanotube-based/Nonvolatile RAM) and Phase-change memory (PRAM), and magnetic disk storage media. Other memories which may become suitable for use in the future include quantum devices and the like.
At present, the size and performance of memory systems may be limited by power consumption, by cooling capacity associated with the power consumption and device density, by response time due to, for example, data skew, by the complexity of the circuit boards needed to interconnect the memory elements, and by the economic costs of these considerations.
This application is related to U.S. Ser. No. 11/405,083 “Interconnection System” by the same inventor, filed on Apr. 17, 2006, the application being incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.